


My Soul to Keep

by Maidenjedi



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:59:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One summer day, a stranger walks the streets of Ogunquit, Maine.  And at night, the children dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Soul to Keep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gryph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryph/gifts).



> a Yuletide Madness treat, despite the length.

'Father, O father! what do we here / In this land of unbelief and fear?' - William Blake

-

He walks the streets of Ogunquit, Maine, just to get a feel for the place. It’s common, in its way, but he’s intrigued. It’s a perfect American town, Ogunquit, full of life. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, perfect families with 2.5 kids and a Buick in the garage. He loves this place because it is, really, what he’s always hoped he’d find. Bucolic, he thinks. Picturesque.

Of course, the stranger (for he is that – no one here knows him, no one ever knows him) has seen such towns before. He knows that they are facades. Everyone is a little bit corrupt, he’s found, a little bit naughty inside. And secrets lie behind doors of all kinds, mahogany or framed screen doors, whitewashed doors and barely-hanging-on-the-hinges doors.

Behind that door, for instance, the one where the little girl with the skinned knees and slightly muddy hem runs to the garage on the side of the house, there is so much more than the cheerful scene before him. “Daddy!” cries the little girl, in a breathy, look-what-I-brought-home voice. “Daddy!”

“What is it, pumpkin?” he asks, concerned.

“Dragons!”

“Dragons?” He pauses to finish tightening the bolt on the project he’s tinkering with. A radio, maybe. He looks down at his daughter, task complete. “Oh, were you on an adventure?”

She nods.

“Did you see any trolls?”

She shakes her head. “But Amy thinks she saw Gollum, Daddy.”

“I see! Did he have the ring? Did she tell him a riddle?”

The conversation continues like this and the little girl, who looks to be nine or ten, too old maybe for elaborate make-believe but never too old for Daddy’s knee, charms the stranger who overhears and sees it all.

But alas, here is Mother, driving up in the Ever-Popular Buick, honking her horn and waving, and there goes the little girl, quick! Into the house, no doubt to wash up and maybe change her dress because while Mother is smiling, she will be harsh if she sees that dirt, even a speck.

Mother sees her running and for a moment, her face falls, her cheerful wave is interrupted with disappointment. And then, scorn, derision, and the briefest flash of impatient indifference. No one but the stranger would have seen that – and he’s not one to tell secrets, so it hardly counts. She recovers, though, and steps out of the car with a smile for her husband and a turned-up nose at the grease on his hands. 

So this is American life in Ogunquit, Maine, and that was Frannie Goldsmith, thinks the stranger. The name strikes a chord in him when he recalls it, but he doesn’t know how he knows it or why it should matter. He files away what he’s seen and walks on.

There is the hospital (he sees it as it is, pristine and efficient, and as it will be, choked with black death and too many corpses). There is the cemetery (and oh, little Freddie, buried under the oak tree!). The drugstore (the vision – overrun and eventually littered with the druggist’s hanging remains in the window). Yes, this is a pleasant town, and he wonders whether the survivors would try to remain. But when will it be, how it will be? That is not given, not foreseen. So on he walks, learning about this place.

Here is another house, a bigger house, and not a Buick in the driveway but a real Cadillac! It’s a beaut, that Caddy, thinks the stranger. A real American classic, with white-walled tires and oh, leather seats! It’s a tasteful black and not unlike a hearse, come to think of it. 

The house is painted white, green shutters on all the windows. The hedges are carefully trimmed and the yard tools nowhere in sight. And who is upstairs, looking daggers out the open window? A young boy, chubby-cheeked and pre-pubescent, and his target is his sister, a knockout in the making, who is just arriving, cheeks flushed and hem only slightly less soiled than Frannie Goldsmith’s had been.

“Amy!” comes a shout from inside. “That you? Time for supper!” In runs Amy, excited to tell her stories and relive her day. This is Frannie’s friend, but she’s of little interest compared to the boy. Her brother, deduces the stranger, and he is unhappy. Why, he is jealous! He is pea-green with envy, a curl to his lip and narrowed eyes all bare for passersby to glimpse. But why?  
There is no other call for anyone to come to supper for a good ten minutes. The boy sits in the window and his face grows darker and he turns away for a bit, the sound of typing now carrying out to the wind. The stranger is intrigued. Does he write about Amy? 

The eventual call for supper (this time from a man who must be the father) reveals his name – Harold. It’s an impatient call, almost done as an afterthought. And it is just that, as is the boy, and now the stranger realizes who this is.

Ah. Yes. Harold.

Landrum? Lester?

“Lauder,” reads the stranger, off the mailbox.

Well, well.

He dreams of Harold, sometimes. Harold is older then, leaner, but that look – lip curled and eyes narrowed – is a positive trademark. 

Harold will be important, he thinks.

The wind picks up and blows a few sheets of paper off a stack on the desk in the upstairs bedroom, Harold’s bedroom. All are blank save one, which as fortune dictates lands close enough to the stranger’s foot for a proper look-see. “Frannie” it reads, with an arrow-slashed heart next to the name. In precise print.

Ah.

Yes.

And the stranger walks on.

-

Dreams come to little Frannie and Harold that night, dreams they don’t later recall.

-  
Cold, dark, and lonely is Harold’s dream. He’s trapped in a building where the lights have gone out. He trips over things, and he is convinced he is tripping over bodies. He comes to the end of a long hall and sees the only light, a sign above a door. “Girls, Girls, Girls!” it reads in neon. He pushed open the door, to escape, also out of curiosity. There stands Frannie, all grown up and naked (identical, in fact, to a picture of a naked Marilyn Monroe he once saw in a filched magazine, and waking he’ll seek that photo again and again), and there stands a man with long hair, wearing a denim jacket with a yellow smiley-faced pin.

“Come see me, Harold. You come see me.”

It’s a soft voice, Frannie’s grown-up voice. Though it comes from the man.

Behind them more naked women are standing and they come forward to Harold. He reaches out a hand, which is promptly slapped away. The man stands over him.

“Not yet. But one day soon.”

-

Across town Frannie dreams of tall corn and wide, blue skies; a rocking chair on a porch and the smell of homemade apple pie and fried chicken. There sits an old black woman, who tells Frannie (small Frannie, tiny Frannie in the dream) that she’s got more lemonade inside if she wants some, fresh. “I got every kind of good thing here, little Fran. Come and see me, would you? Someday. I’ll be here.”

And a crow caws from the field, first one, then dozens, and the old woman shakes her fist at them. “Ain’t had a scarecrow could really scare them crows in years, now.”

Frannie turns and there are more crows now than corn, and she waves her arms and runs at them. “Go, crows! Go on!” She bats at them and they fly off, their “caws” angry and resigned. All but one. 

It doesn’t caw. It looks at her. It looks into her.

“Don’t you pay that crow no mind, child,” says the woman. “Just come on over here and have some lemonade.”

And Frannie does.


End file.
